Almost every person in business has carried business cards to hand out to others, or has received business cards from other individuals. Conventionally, business cards contain the name and address of an individual, a company name and address, and perhaps some advertising message dealing with products or services offered. Usually, business cards are collected and visually inspected some time later to obtain telephone numbers of individuals and to identify products or services, etc. Arrangements are available to store business cards in a physical format that facilitates their visual inspection.
One of the problems of maintaining a library of business cards is the difficulty in arranging the data therein by individual name, or company name, or categorizing the cards by product and/or services. With the proliferation of computers, programs are now available that facilitate establishing and maintaining a library of business cards. Such programs, however, require manual keying of names, addresses, telephone numbers, services, etc. into a database which then can be accessed to permit sorting in almost any desired manner to provide printouts of any desired fields of data in any order. Manual keying of data is, however, time consuming and frequently inaccurate; and for this reason, individuals often resist this task. It is therefore an object of the present invention to provide a new and improved method of and means for storing and retrieving information on a business card which eliminates the need to handkey data.